Here's an interesting thing: there are other fields too. People tend to forget we need Civil Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Electronic Engineers, etc... This is not the end of the world. STEM professionals were switching careers because of the money and other amenities tech companies were offering (See "a day in x-company" trend on social media).
The way I see it (cynical take) is that there has been a push to get lots of people in this field just to have a bigger pool of workers and lower SWE/Dev Salaries. Heck, small companies can't compete on salary + benefits when trying to pouch SWEs/Devs. For these companies, this scenario will be a God send since they could offer lower salaries (45k ~ 70k) but with the added value of WFH. My prediction: We'll see everything ramping up again in 2024 (Prob. Q1). On the other side, tech companies will start lowering salaries, taking advantage of the uncertainty. Basically win-win for companies.
In the big picture, FAANG salaries are outliers. Boom and bust cycles come and go, and when it is booming again - circumstances can have changed.
I worked with people in oil and gas that never came back, probably making only 25%-50% of what did they did during their best years.
Finance, too. Lots of young bankers were forced out back in 08-09, and never returned.
(With that said, tech is a bit more flexible on hiring, and I don’t think a 350k engineer will have to take a 300k pay cut, finding a “normal” ~100k engineering job is very possible. Or even another FAANG job if you’re willing to keep going at it. Could take weeks, months, even years - depending on how bad the market is)
Depends on the quality of the developers you're looking to hire.
The market for the kinds of developers that command ~$350-500k is still incredibly tight. There's a reason that even though Stripe is reducing headcount by 14% engineers are mostly unaffected.
And worse, it's really hard to find good teachers, nurses, or doctors in the bay area. Frances Allen used to be a teacher because teaching was a decent profession in the 60s. Feynman's teacher can recommend amazing books about integrals, while nowadays many teachers could factor a^3 - b^3 correctly, and the physics teacher of the NASA director's son ask questions like "which is heavier, a pound or a kg" in 9th grader's physics class.
You can't "push" people into a field. I know smart people who would quite literally go insane if they had to stare at a screen all day. They don't have autism. They want to work with people not machines. So they work in healthcare.
The way I see it (cynical take) is that there has been a push to get lots of people in this field just to have a bigger pool of workers and lower SWE/Dev Salaries. Heck, small companies can't compete on salary + benefits when trying to pouch SWEs/Devs. For these companies, this scenario will be a God send since they could offer lower salaries (45k ~ 70k) but with the added value of WFH. My prediction: We'll see everything ramping up again in 2024 (Prob. Q1). On the other side, tech companies will start lowering salaries, taking advantage of the uncertainty. Basically win-win for companies.